Another of the management paradoxes littered through this blog , and this one is counter to almost everything I have ever written.
In the context of true innovation, listening to customers exclusively leads you to adjusting, improving, repackaging what you currently have.
Real innovation is about inventing the future, and you cannot do it just by playing with the present.
The following challenge is if you are smart enough to invent the future you also have to be smart enough to recognize it when you see it.
Kodak did not see digital photography, but they invented it, IBM struggled to see that the PC would take over from big box computing, Microsoft did not see the web, until it had almost passed them, but Steve Jobs did see touch as the replacement for the mouse, which he originally saw as the devise to democratize personal computers.
